Marquette University e-Publications@Marquette English Faculty Research and Publications English, Department of 1-2019 Eden, Just Not Ours Yet: On Parable of the Trickster and Utopia Gerry Canavan Marquette University, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://epublications.marquette.edu/english_fac Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Canavan, Gerry, "Eden, Just Not Ours Yet: On Parable of the Trickster and Utopia" (2019). English Faculty Research and Publications. 533. https://epublications.marquette.edu/english_fac/533 1 Gerry Canavan (Associate Professor, Marquette University) [email protected] // 414-899-7799 Eden, Just Not Ours Yet: On Parable of the Trickster and Utopia The last chapter of Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Talents (1998) sees an aged Lauren Olamina in 2090, surrounded by several of her most devoted disciples at the launch of the first Earthseed mission, the beginning of the extrasolar colonization project to which she has devoted her entire adult life. We are told very early on in Parable of the Sower (1993), when Olamina is still a young teenager, that “The Destiny of Earthseed is to take root among the stars” (Butler Sower 85)—and by the end of Talents that dream seems to have been achieved, though it has personally cost Olamina nearly everything else in her life, including her daughter, her husband, her brother, and her personal safety. She herself is now much too old to go on such a mission, a Moses permanently denied her own Promised Land—though she imagines her ashes someday being brought to one of the Earthseed colonies after her death. Regardless of this fact, she feels not disappointed, but defiant; her last words in the novel are a confident “I know what I’ve done” (Butler Talents 409)—though the repetition of the phrase at the beginning and end of the three- page epilogue may suggest to some readers that she may actually be attempting to convince herself of its truth. The name of the ship in orbit, too, strikes a subtly discordant note: against Olamina’s wishes it has been dubbed the Christopher Columbus, suggesting first the danger of repeating a toxic colonial history and second suggesting that some other parties, with different values than the Earthseeders, have exerted some sort of noxious influence over the mission, in competition with Olamina’s. “I object to the name,” Olamina writes. “The ship is not about a shortcut to riches and empire. It’s not about snatching up slaves and presenting them to some European monarch. But one can’t win every battle. One must know which battles to fight. The name is nothing” (Butler Talents 408). Here Talents ends, as does the Parables series, which never saw its completion in future books beginning with the long-promised, never-completed Parable of the Trickster. In my Modern Masters of Science Fiction monograph Octavia E. Butler I detail how the release of Butler’s archives at the Huntington Library reveals the enormity of her fifteen year struggle with Trickster, beginning even before the publication of Sower with her original 1989 concept for 2 God of Clay, and continuing through her unexpected early death in 2006.1 In (not) writing Trickster Butler found herself stymied by writer’s block, by medications that she felt sapped her creativity, and by what she saw as an inability to move from what she called a “situation” (OEB 2076) into a proper story. In this article I build on my published treatment with something on the order of a deleted scene from my book: a utopian close reading of the world-building for the initial setting of the Trickster narrative undertaken by Butler between 1989 and the early 2000s period in which she finally abandoned the project. If, in Octavia E. Butler, I focused on the “story” part of Trickster that never really materialized, here I am concerned instead with what Butler saw as mere “situation”: the originary, quasi-utopian backdrop of the extrasolar colony, against which the grim disaster of Trickster would have later unfolded. Even to the extent that the literary estate continues to publish more of Butler’s unpublished fiction from the archives,2 it is bit hard to know exactly what to do with the Trickster fragments. While she tried unsuccessfully to sell works like the original 1970s story bearing the title “The Evening and The Morning and the Night” and Blindsight, the Trickster narrative she simply began and abandoned over and over and over again, a nearly impossible number of times. Despite her inability to complete it, or even to really begin it, what exists of Trickster is utterly fascinating and provocative, and it gives us a beautiful and necessary glimmer of what the extension of the Parables series might have been like without closing any doors or providing any solid answers or definitive conclusions. We need Trickster: we need Trickster to get us out of the hopeless trap that Talents leaves us in, where the soaring hopes and ambitions of Sower wither, disciplined and betrayed by the unending unfolding of the nightmare of history; we need Trickster to tell us whether the utopian break in history promised by the Earthseed project has been squandered or compromised by whatever Powers-That-Be have circumvented Olamina and given the ship its macho, retro-conquistador branding. Butler writes in one of her journals that the alien planet the Earthseeders will go to (there called Ola, though more commonly in other versions called Bow) will itself be “the Trickster, always tripping us when we get arrogant, and yielding when we feel beaten. At every crossroads, Ola waits, pushes, guides, tears, blocks, threatens. Ola tricks and Ola teaches” (OEB 3147). I have always adored Nisi Shawl’s suggestion in “The Third Parable” that Trickster, the book, is a Trickster figure too; the book itself is slippery and untrustworthy, it can’t be wrangled or tamed, it keeps slinking out of Butler’s (and out of our) grasps. It trips us up when we think we can ever understand what the Parables are teaching us and it yielded to us (quite literally, in fragmentary form in the archive) just when we gave up hope and decided it was never going to come. It’s the one missing piece that would have solved the puzzle—if only it’d been written. But we can’t allow the unhappy fact that the book doesn’t exist to silence its message; like our anxiety at discovering the name of the Earthseeders’ ship, that feeling of disappointment at the end of Talents shouldn’t and can’t be where our learning ends. The Parables books just mean so much; on Twitter I see new people discovering the books daily, twenty years after their composition but somehow feeling even more relevant now, after the election of Donald Trump has unhappily proved them righter than we ever would have dreamed. In whatever form is practical, readable, and economically viable, I hope non-scholars are someday allowed to see for themselves these 1 See Canavan, Octavia E. Butler (2016), chapter 6, “God of Clay.” For details on the way the failed Trickster narratives eventually mutated into Fledging, “Amnesty,” and “The Book of Martha,” as well as into other incomplete works existing only in the Huntington Archives, see also chapter 7, “Paraclete.” 2 I argue that the estate should feel empowered to publish that fiction, over and against Butler’s stated wishes to the contrary when necessary, in my essay “Disrepecting Octavia” in Lumenescent Threads. 3 tantalizing glimmers of what Trickster might have been. In some sense it may be that the book is always all the more powerful for its eerie nonexistence; Trickster, unfinished and unformed, will always remain available to be discovered, will always be out there waiting to teach us something new. Parable of the Trickster So then what do we actually have in Trickster, now that we have the Huntington archive to guide us? We have another planet: sometimes Ola or Olamina, occasionally Trickster, but most typically Bow, for the occasional rainbows that provide the dreary world its only splash of color. Other than that the place is typically described as a sickly gray from top to bottom, even its vegetation, a fact the human colonists find maddening and miserable. The colonists have no way to return to Earth, or to even contact it; all they have is what little they’ve brought with them, which for most (but, crucially, not all) of them is a strong belief in the wisdom of the teachings of Earthseed. Some are terrified; many are bored; an increasing number teeter on the brink of severe psychological crisis; nearly all are deeply unhappy. The colonists are homesick; they are in the wrong place, a place that human beings can’t live without constant, tremendous exertion. Having lived on Bow only a short while, most, maybe all, would happily go home if they could. But this is their life now, and always will be. The point of view character for these events is nearly always a woman named Imara, who (usually) has some sort of connection to Olamina. Sometimes she is a distant relative, a child of Keith’s, or some lost great-uncle; sometimes she is an adopted daughter, taken in by Olamina or by the Earthseed church itself in her childhood after a horrific personal tragedy (often sexually violent in nature). The most characteristic version of the narrative has Imara as the bearer of Olamina’s ashes: Olamina having died between the launch of the first space mission and this one (almost always the second).